Weaving Dreams With Dreamweaver

Spent most of the day playing around with Dreamweaver. I'll be adding a 500-page database to Tokyo Robotnik soon so I'm enjoying Dreamweaver's tools for search-and-replace across multiple files etc. Some people allege that the database is merely a cheap attempt at getting some Googlejuice. Such allegations are without foundation.

Hypermedia

Spent the day reading about Virtual Reality and human computer interaction. Also read a long article on Ted Nelson. Nelson has some very interesting ideas, although he's too bitter and too crazy. I saw him speak about his hypertext project a couple of years ago in London. His ideas for hypertext are much more far reaching than HTML, sadly he hasn't got anywhere with it over the past 30 years.

I've decided that I must finally learn to use Dreamweaver. I'll probably have to teach it at work soon, and it would be useful for making prototype websites. My only concern is that it will make me lazy and I'll start producing crappy websites using tables and non-compliant HTML and CSS, just like I used to:)

City At Night

Woke up shortly before 6 am. Had lost all my confidence. Went back to sleep and slept until around 9 am. Fell asleep again and woke at 11:30 am. Fuck.

Had to drop a repeat prescription off for a family member. When I got to the doctors' surgery I found that it had closed for lunch and would reopen in 30 minutes. I headed into a nearby park to kill some time. Hanging around in parks on grey days is my idea of fun.

Keiko came over to get some help in an art history essay. She spent some time watching me improving my CSS, and then we watched music videos from the 1980's. Then she left. Art history is crap anyway:)

Hung around beside a road for part of the night. I took a photo of it for the enjoyment of everyone out there in Internet Land.

Webwise

Gemma and I headed over to Simon's house in the morning. Nobody else came until after 11 am, although we were due to start at 9:30 am.

When some other people arrived, I started the workshop on web design. I talked for many hours and answered lots of questions. Simon has a video projector so I was able to demonstrate a lot of HTML and CSS stuff.

Teaching people to build and maintain real websites is surprisingly difficult. People want to know all about formatting and positioning without understanding protocols, standards, inheritance, usability, accessibility and all the other stuff that makes up 80% of real web design.